EBUCore is the EBU flagship specification for metadata, and last week’s Production Technology Seminar (PTS) provided a wealth of evidence for this. EBUCore is a metadata specification for “users with different needs”. Several of these users explained at PTS how they have deliberately chosen and benefited from EBUCore.
The UK’s Digital Production Partnership (DPP), which recently published its new specification for file-based programme delivery, is mapping its metadata to EBUCore and TV-Anytime. (TV-Anytime was co-founded by the EBU, who chaired the metadata activities and now actively maintains the specification on behalf of ETSI.) More harmonisation work is foreseen as EBUCore is registered in SMPTE.
EBUCore is also used as the solution for metadata aggregation in EUScreen, the European audiovisual archives portal. As reported at PTS, EUScreen is now a key contributor to Europeana, the European digital library. Two forms of EBUCore are used in this context, the EBUCore XML metadata schema and also the EBUCore RDF ontology, which has largely inspired the W3C Media annotation ontology based on the EBU Class Conceptual Data Model (CCDM) and co-authored by the EBU.
Also reported at last week’s PTS:
• The NoTube project has combined egtaMeta (an EBU specification extending the EBUCore for the exchange of commercials) and TV-Anytime to develop innovative solutions in targeting advertising.
• EBUCore is also used in combination with MPEG-7 in the VISION Cloud project exploring technologies for storage in the cloud. The EBU is directly involved in the definition and promotion of the new MPEG-7 AVDP profile.
• Singapore’s national broadcaster, MediaCorp, has implemented and adapted EBUCore/SMMCore into its internal company metadata framework.
• The EBU-AMWA FIMS project, specifying an industrial solution for web service (SOA) based production architectures. The phase 1 specification of FIMS (FIMS 1.0) uses EBUCore as its core descriptive and technical metadata.
And this is just a small selection. Among others, EBUCore is also republished by the Audio Engineering Society (AES) as AES60.
Watch this space as the EBU will soon publish a user-friendly EBUCore mapping tool on its website.